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Work and Skills

I agree, and later I shall come to what we can do to deal with those two problems. This month, the number of jobseekers has risen from 31,800 to 929,900. I accept the point that the Minister made: people are moving in and out of those figures. Nevertheless, the large number of long-term unemployed is an issue of concern. I want to talk a little about what the Government can and should do to get more people back into work. I want to use as an example some of the work that my local council in Rochdale has done to get people into work, because that is vital. Rochdale has set up a joint project with Oldham called J21, which is tied to the development of the large industrial development at Kingsway. Between them, members of the Kingsway recruitment team have trained 1,300 people and helped get them into work over the past two years. In Rochdale and elsewhere, however, there has been a large increase in the number of redundancies. I do not know whether the Minister saw the announcement last week by MFI that a number of its stores would close. After the receiver looked at which stores were viable, the closure of 86 stores was announced. That announcement was made in a national newspaper—the Daily Mirror—last Friday. If employers are to issue redundancy notices by that method, it brings into question how such things are done and what is the right way of going about it. There was no warning to the employees who were affected: they read it in the newspaper. If unemployment is going to rise, we must make sure that we have mechanisms in place to deal with that. The Minister's commitment not to close Jobcentre Plus offices in areas with high unemployment is therefore welcome.